The Demands of Mahler’s Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies

When pressed to elaborate on his remark about difficulties with certain Mahler symphonies in an interview last week, Daniel Barenboim said: “It’s not that I consider them less complete. You know, I came relatively late to Mahler. I didn’t conduct any Mahler symphonies until the early ’70s, and I didn’t like a lot of it and therefore didn’t feel that I really wanted to tackle them. Some of it is artificial for me, and I don’t feel anything.”

The only symphony he named was the outsize Eighth, which leaves even some ardent Mahlerians relatively cold. But the Second, Third and Fourth, that grand trilogy of works so much of a piece in their sharing of musical themes and literary sources yet so wildly varied in their towering or melting emotions?

For whatever reasons, those three works fell to Pierre Boulez to conduct in the chronological survey of the Mahler symphonies that he and Mr. Barenboim are presenting with the Staatskapelle Berlin at Carnegie Hall. And from Thursday through Saturday Mr. Boulez made the Staatskapelle sound like a different orchestra from the one heard in Mr. Barenboim’s performance of the First Symphony on Wednesday: still not a great orchestra, but a good one, seemingly overworked.

From the outset in the Second on Thursday the playing was more settled, with greater focus, intensity and unanimity. Despite problems among the brass instruments throughout, the earlier movements were compelling, and made more so by the mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung’s stirring delivery of the “Urlicht.”

Stamina, Mr. Barenboim said in the interview, should not be a problem, since the Staatskapelle, of which he is music director, is also the orchestra of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin and thus used to long nights and weeks of opera. It played the Mahler symphonies in quick succession in 2007 in Berlin and later repeated them in two parts in Vienna.

Photo

Pierre Boulez conducting Mahlers Second with the soloists, center from left, Dorothea Röschmann and Michelle DeYoung.Credit
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Still, these hugely demanding works are not yet familiar enough to the players to allow for the element of rote that may help them through many a lengthy Wagner opera, and the orchestra is going through a punishing 12 days of rehearsal and performance here. It certainly seemed that fatigue was already a factor in the Second Symphony, and at one point in the finale the erratic brass players threatened to bring the performance to its knees.

The orchestra regained its balance under Mr. Boulez’s steady hand and — joined by the soprano Dorothea Röschmann, Ms. DeYoung and the excellent Westminster Symphonic Choir — mustered a proper note of sustained triumph at the end. Yet this performance did not bode entirely well for the Third Symphony on Friday, with its resounding opening horn call and its heavy reliance on brass instruments elsewhere.

As it happened, that horn call was just fine and the brass playing throughout only mildly accident prone. A good thing, because this work is a Boulez specialty, and he was masterly, turning that huge and unwieldy first movement into a model of symphonic logic. The climaxes seemed all the more powerful for being meticulously prepared as part of a measured whole.

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Though the woodwinds lacked the tonal luster needed to make the swaying subsidiary theme shimmer, the rest of the movement, and of the work, was almost wholly persuasive. Ms. DeYoung made much of another haunted tune in “O Mensch!”

After all that heavy lifting, the concert on Saturday was a picture of relaxation and ease. Ms. Röschmann sang six songs from Mahler’s cycle “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” and Mr. Boulez and the orchestra gave a lovely performance of the Fourth Symphony. The strings were especially fine in the songful moments leading into the outburst before the finale.

In that finale, as in the “Wunderhorn” songs, Ms. Röschmann sang with beautiful soaring or lilting tone but tended toward overcuteness in her manner. And in the finale of the Second Symphony on Thursday she gave an almost operatic cast to a part whose character should be defined by its first entry, when it emerges ever so subtly from the chorus, a gorgeous bloom rising out of the melody of the massed sopranos. In all cases simplicity might have served better.

Among the hard-working musicians, none worked harder than Wolf-Dieter Batzdorf, the concertmaster in all the concerts. He was equally effective in sinuous melodies and in the morbid dance of the Fourth Symphony’s scherzo, with its weirdly retuned fiddle. Christian Batzdorf, a trumpeter and the concertmaster’s son, made fine work of the posthorn solos in the Third’s scherzando.